Meditation helps depression

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy... is a cutting-edge approach to treating people with anxiety and depression. Only a handful of therapists are doing it.

Developed in the late 1990s by a team of researchers led by Zindel Segal, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Toronto, the technique has been shown to be highly effective in staving off repeated bouts of depression.

In 2000, Segal and two other researchers published a study of 145 patients showing that those who took an eight-week course to learn how to practice mindfulness were half as likely to suffer a relapse into depression over the next 12 months as those who received only the usual treatment.

The technique was found to be most effective for those who have suffered three or more episodes of depression before receiving it, reducing the risk of relapse from 66 percent to 37 percent.

A follow-up study, published in 2002 by Teasdale and Helen Ma in Cambridge, produced comparable results, showing the therapy reduced the rate of relapse from 78 percent to 36 percent in those who had three or more episodes of depression.